In a city that prides itself on its diversity, the Pico Neighborhood
remains a world apart. In a special three-part series The Lookout explores
the physical and psychological boundaries that separate Santa Monica’s
poorest neighborhood and the crime that often plagues its youth.

By Blair Clarkson

December 2 -- May 9, 2003 should have been a night of peaceful
celebration for 27-year-old Marizsa Bravo-Casillas. With her sister at
home babysitting her four young children, she and her husband had gone
out to enjoy a quiet birthday dinner alone at a favorite restaurant. It
was a rare treat. But it wouldn’t last long.

While her kids watched TV and readied for bed, a storm was brewing on
the streets outside her apartment on 17th Street and Michigan Avenue in
the Pico neighborhood. As she waited for her entrée, Bravo-Casillas
had no idea how close she would come to losing one or more of those children
when the storm broke.

At around 9:30 p.m. -- before her food had even been served -- her cell
phone rang. It was her sister. In a panic.

A staccato burst of gunfire had erupted on the street outside her apartment
and a stray bullet had ripped through the wall of her children’s bedroom.

The bullet, which missed the head of her sleeping 8-year-old daughter
Leanna by mere feet, punched a hole through the wall above the girl’s
dresser, sliced through the opposite wall above her 10-year-old son’s
dresser, shattered a glass shower door in the adjoining bathroom and clattered
to a halt in the bathroom sink.

Leanna, who
attends Edison Elementary, holds up her drawing with a bullet hole.

“The bullet went in at their dresser level,” said Bravo-Casillas, still
shaken by the year-old shooting. “Had it been 15-20 minutes earlier my
children would have been standing at their dressers getting their pajamas.
That’s a scary thought.”

Unfortunately for many Pico residents, chilling incidents like this one
have become all too common in the blocks surrounding the I-10 Freeway,
where decades of housing segregation and overcrowding in low-income developments
have contributed to some of the highest rates of aggravated assaults,
gun violence, gang-related activity and juvenile crime in the city.

The violence was highlighted by a rash of retaliatory killings in 1998
that left four Pico youth dead, and a flare-up last May, which claimed
no lives but resulted in a Police raid of the neighborhood.

“I really had no idea that’s what I was moving into,” said Bravo-Casillas,
who brought her young family from Inglewood four years prior. “Ironically,
I left Inglewood because it wasn’t a good neighborhood, and I left there
to come here and have a bullet actually go through my house.”

Over the last ten years, the Santa Monica Police Department has made
numerous efforts to combat such sporadic outbreaks of violence within
the Pico neighborhood and the city as a whole, with steadily decreasing
crime statistics to show for it.

Officials proudly tout a citywide violent crime rate that is down 62
percent over the last decade, and an overall crime rate hovering at its
lowest level in 40 years. Figures for all major crimes (including rapes,
assaults, robberies, larcenies and car thefts) have shown marked declines
since 1994 both in Pico and citywide.

Yet despite these rosier city statistics, “the shootings continue” in
Pico, said Bravo-Casillas, who works with at-risk youth in the Pico Youth
and Family Center as a result of her family's brush with violence.

While citywide crime rates have generally fallen, over the same ten-year
period Pico has remained the only neighborhood plagued by violent assaults,
according to Police Chief James T. Butts.

In 1994, there were 490 aggravated assaults reported in the city -- including
the pier and Promenade -- and 56 in Pico (11.4 percent). In 2003, police
records show 290 aggravated assaults citywide and 25 in Pico (8.6 percent).

Eleven of the City’s 47 reported homicides over the last decade occurred
in Pico, according to police records, and between 1989 and 1998, 22 youth
lost their lives on Pico streets.

Excluding the heavily trafficked tourist and commercial areas of the
Promenade, pier and downtown, no residential neighborhood has seen more
violence in its streets than Pico.

According to Butts, while the total number of incidents has declined
over the years, “Pico is more challenged by incidences of assault and
violent crime than other neighborhoods.”

Frustrated residents point to the City’s history of squeezing all the
low-income and assisted-living housing into the Pico neighborhood as a
source of the overcrowded conditions that have spurred much of the violence.

“There are always higher concentrations of gunfire where there are higher
concentrations of low-income housing,” said former Pico Neighborhood Association
board member Peter Tigler. “They go hand in hand.”

Indeed, weekly police crime reports routinely show more crimes occurring
in Pico neighborhood districts, where population densities are among the
highest in the city, while areas north of Montana and south of Pico Boulevard
-- in neighborhoods predominated by larger single-family homes -- have
less crime.

“There’s a correlation between crime and poverty,” said school-board
member and neighborhood activist Oscar de la Torre, who runs the Pico
Youth and Family Center. Crime “is a symptom, a product of a much larger
problem.”

That problem is made worse, many argue, because of the lack of attention
the neighborhood receives from the rest of the city.

“It alarms me how many people in Santa Monica don’t know that this (violence)
is going on,” said Bravo-Casillas, who has been disappointed by the degree
of neighborhood exclusivity here. Santa Monica, she said, feels less like
one city and more like a group of diverse boroughs that share nothing
more than common borders.

“I don’t understand why other people don’t feel that this is a community-based
problem,” she said. “It’s almost as if north of Montana or north of Wilshire
(they say) ‘that’s over there, that’s the Pico neighborhood.’”

While this sense of isolation runs rampant, perhaps more alarming to
residents and civic leaders is the increasing number of youth crimes and
violence spilling out onto neighborhood streets.

Although overall crime rates have dropped steadily over recent years,
a recent RAND study found that juvenile arrests jumped dramatically over
the same period. From 1996 to 2002, youth arrests swelled from 153 to
347 citywide (a 127-percent rise).

Much of the increase was spurred by a rise in arrests for minor offenses
like vandalism and truancy and a new emphasis on juvenile intervention
by the SMPD, according to the study.

However, the figures also include a 260-percent bump in assaults, a 300-percent
rise in weapons arrests and a 57-percent hike in drug busts.

This is particularly troubling for the Pico neighborhood, which has the
highest concentrations of young people in the City, according to census
data, including 32 percent of all 15-19 year olds and 36 percent of all
20-24 year olds.

“The crime profile in the City is made unique only by the levels of violent
behavior primarily conducted amongst and between males in the age group
of 17-29,” said Chief Butts. “Absent that profile, Pico would have a better
aggregate crime profile than the rest of the City.”

Concerned residents agree.

“If you exclude the gun play and teenage violence,” Tigler said, “we
mirror every other neighborhood in Santa Monica. But when you look at
the amount of gunfire and teenage violence, that’s the issue” that links
together Pico and crime in people’s minds.

Much of that crime, Butts noted, can be attributed to a small faction
of delinquents.

“I believe that we have an indigenous group of repeat offenders,” he
said, “that tend to be over-represented as suspects and victims of crimes
and that are responsible for the preponderance of aggravated assaults
that are committed.”

They “engage in conflicts with one another” and with others outside of
Pico, he said, leading to “incidents of retaliation.”